Alfred North Whitehead

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was a British mathematician,
logician and philosopher best known for his work in mathematical logic
and the philosophy of science. In collaboration with
Bertrand Russell,
he co-authored the landmark three-volume
Principia Mathematica
(1910, 1912, 1913). Later he was instrumental in pioneering the approach
to metaphysics now known as
process philosophy.

Although there are important continuities throughout his career,
Whitehead's intellectual life is often divided into three main
periods. The first corresponds roughly to his time at Cambridge,
from 1884 to 1910. It was during these years that he worked primarily
on issues in mathematics and logic. It was also during this time that
he collaborated with Russell. The second main period, from 1910 to
1924, corresponds roughly to his time at London. During these years
Whitehead concentrated mainly, but not exclusively, on issues in the
philosophy of science and the
philosophy of education.
The third main
period corresponds roughly to his time at Harvard, from 1924
onward. It was during this time that he worked primarily on issues
in metaphysics.

(1903) Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society as a result of his work
on universal algebra, symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics.

(1910) Resigns from Cambridge and moves to London.

(1911) Appointed Lecturer at University College London.

(1914) Appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Imperial
College of Science and Technology.

(1922) Elected President of the Aristotelian Society.

(1924) Appointed Professor of Philosophy at Harvard
University.

(1931) Elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

(1937) Retires from Harvard.

(1945) Awarded Order of Merit.

(1947) Dies December 30 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

The son of an Anglican clergyman, Whitehead graduated from Cambridge
in 1884 and was elected a Fellow of Trinity College that same
year. His marriage to Evelyn Wade six years later was largely a happy
one and together they had a daughter and three sons, one of whom sadly died
at birth. After moving to London, Whitehead served as president of the
Aristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923. After moving to Harvard, he
was elected to the British Academy in 1931. His moves to both London
and Harvard were prompted in part by institutional regulations
requiring mandatory retirement, although his resignation from
Cambridge was also done partly in protest over how the University had
chosen to discipline Andrew Forsyth, a friend and colleague whose
affair with a married woman had become something of a local scandal.

As fellowship examiner for Bertrand Russell
and academic supervisor for
Willard Van Orman Quine,
Whitehead exerted enormous influence on the
development of twentieth-century philosophy. This is true even though
his main philosophical doctrine – that the world is composed of
deeply interdependent processes and events, rather than mostly
independent material things or objects – turned out to be
largely the opposite of Russell's doctrine of
logical atomism.

More detailed information about Whitehead's life can be found in the
comprehensive two-volume biography A.N. Whitehead: The Man and His
Work (1985, 1990) by Victor Lowe and J.B. Schneewind. Paul
Schilpp's The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1941; 2nd
edn 1951) also includes a short autobiographical essay, in addition to
providing a comprehensive critical overview of Whitehead's thought and
a detailed bibliography of his writings.

Other helpful introductions to Whitehead's work include Victor Lowe's
Understanding Whitehead (1962), Nathaniel Lawrence's
Whitehead's Philosophical Development (1956), Wolfe Mays'
The Philosophy of Whitehead (1959) and Michael Epperson's
Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North
Whitehead (2004). For a chronology of Whitehead's major
publications, readers are encouraged to consult the
Primary Literature section of the
Bibliography below.

Attempts to sum up Whitehead's life and influence are complicated by
the fact that, following his death and in accordance with his
instructions, all his papers were destroyed. As a result, there is no
nachlass, except for papers retained by his colleagues and
correspondents. Even so, it is instructive to recall the words of the
late Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Felix
Frankfurter: “From knowledge gained through the years of the
personalities who in our day have affected American university life, I
have for some time been convinced that no single figure has had such a
pervasive influence as the late Professor Alfred North
Whitehead” (Letter, New York Times, January 8, 1948).

Today Whitehead's ideas continue to be felt in varying degrees in all four
of the main areas in which he worked: logic and mathematics, the
philosophy of science, the philosophy of education and metaphysics. A
critical edition
of his work is currently in the process of being prepared.

Whitehead began his academic career at Trinity College, Cambridge
where, starting in 1884, he taught for a quarter of a century. In
1890, Bertrand Russell arrived as a student
and during the 1890s the two men came into regular contact with one
another. According to Russell, “Whitehead was extraordinarily
perfect as a teacher. He took a personal interest in those with whom
he had to deal and knew both their strong and their weak points. He
would elicit from a pupil the best of which a pupil was capable. He
was never repressive, or sarcastic, or superior, or any of the things
that inferior teachers like to be. I think that in all the abler young
men with whom he came in contact he inspired, as he did in me, a very
real and lasting affection” (1967, 129–130).

By the early 1900s, both Whitehead and Russell had completed books on
the foundations of mathematics. Whitehead's 1898 A Treatise on
Universal Algebra had resulted in his election to the Royal
Society. Russell's 1903 The Principles of Mathematics had
expanded on several themes initially developed by Whitehead. Russell's book
also represented a decisive break from the neo-Kantian approach to
mathematics Russell had developed six years earlier in his Essay on the Foundations
of Geometry. Since the research for a proposed
second volume of Russell's Principles overlapped considerably
with Whitehead's own research for a planned second volume of his
Universal Algebra, the two men began collaboration on what
eventually would become
Principia Mathematica
(1910, 1912, 1913). According to Whitehead, they initially expected
the research to take about a year to complete. In the end, they worked
together on the project for a decade.

Logicism, the theory that mathematics is in some important sense
reducible to logic, consists of two main theses. The first is that all
mathematical truths can be translated into logical truths or, in other
words, that the vocabulary of mathematics constitutes a proper subset
of the vocabulary of logic. The second is that all mathematical proofs
can be recast as logical proofs or, in other words, that the theorems
of mathematics constitute a proper subset of the theorems of
logic.

Like Gottlob Frege, Whitehead and Russell
immediately saw the advantages of such a reduction. Statements such as
“There are at least two books” would be recast as
“There is a book, x, and there is a book, y,
and x is not identical to y.” Statements such
as “There are exactly two books” would be recast as
“There is a book, x, and there is a book, y,
and x is not identical to y, and if there is a book,
z, then z is identical to either x or
y.” Number-theoretic operations could then be explained
in terms of set-theoretic operations such as intersection, union, and
difference. In Principia Mathematica, Whitehead and
Russell were able to provide many detailed derivations of major
theorems in set theory, finite and transfinite arithmetic, and
elementary measure theory. They were also able to develop a
sophisticated theory of logical relations and a unique method of
defining the real numbers. Even so, the issue of whether set theory
itself could be said to have been successfully reduced to logic
remained controversial. (For additional discussion, see the entry on
Principia Mathematica,
as well as George and Velleman (2002).)

Following the completion of Principia, Whitehead and Russell
began to go their separate ways. Perhaps inevitably, Russell's
anti-war activities and Whitehead's loss of his youngest son during
World War I led to something of a split between the two men.
Nevertheless, the two remained on relatively good terms for the rest
of their lives. To his credit, Russell comments in his
Autobiography that when it came to their political
differences, Whitehead “was more tolerant than I was, and it was
much more my fault than his that these differences caused a diminution
in the closeness of our friendship” (1967, 127).

In London, Whitehead turned his attention primarily
to issues in the philosophy of science. Of particular note was his
rejection of the idea that each physical object has a simple spatial
or temporal location. Instead, Whitehead came to the conclusion that
all objects should be understood as fields having both temporal and
spatial extensions. For example, just as we cannot perceive a
Euclidean point that is said to have position but no magnitude, or a
line that is said to have length but no breadth, it is impossible,
says Whitehead, to conceive of a simple spatial or temporal
location. To think that we can do so involves what he called
“The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness,” the error of
mistaking the abstract for the concrete (1925, 64, 72).

As Whitehead describes his position,

among the primary elements
of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no
element whatever which possesses this character of simple location.
… [Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive
abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located
bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds
included in the scientific scheme. (1925, 72; cf. 1919, Pt 3)

Whitehead's basic thought was that we obtain the abstract idea of a
spatial point by considering the limit of a real-life series of
volumes extending over each other in much the same way
that we might consider a nested series of Russian dolls or a nested
series of pots and pans. However, it would be a mistake to think of a
spatial point as being anything more than an abstraction; instead,
real positions involve the entire series of extended volumes. As
Whitehead puts it, “In a certain sense, everything is everywhere
at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every
other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the
world” (1925, 114).

According to Whitehead, every real-life object may then be understood
as a similarly constructed series of events and processes. It is this
latter idea that Whitehead systematically elaborates in
his Process and Reality (1929c), concluding that it is
process, rather than substance, that should be taken as the most
fundamental metaphysical constituent of the world:

That ‘all things flow’ is the first vague
generalization which the unsystematized, barely analysed, intuition of
men has produced. … Without doubt, if we are to go back to that
ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of
theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of
philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around
which we must weave our philosophical system. (1929c, 317)

Underlying Whitehead's work was also the idea that, if philosophy is
to be successful, it must explain the connection between our
objective, scientific and logical descriptions of the world and the
more everyday world of subjective experience. As Whitehead writes,

Nature is nothing else than the deliverance of
sense-awareness. … Our knowledge of nature is an experience of
activity (or passage). The things previously observed are active
entities, the ‘events.’ They are chunks in the life of
nature. (1920, 185)

For this reason it is one of Whitehead's core beliefs that “We
must avoid vicious bifurcation” (1920, 185). In other words, we
must avoid dividing the world into separate categories of mind and
matter, or into nature as it is apprehended in awareness and nature as
the cause of that awareness. As Whitehead explains,

The nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness
holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the
warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the
velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured
system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to
produce the awareness of apparent nature. (1920, 31)

Ultimately, says Whitehead, all experience is a part of nature:
“We may not pick and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset
should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric
waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon”
(1920, 29; cf. 1929c, Pt 2, Ch. 9, sec. 2).

While in London, Whitehead became involved in many practical
aspects of tertiary education, serving as Dean of the Faculty of
Science at Imperial College and holding several other administrative
posts. Many of his essays about education date from this time and
appear in his book, The Aims of Education and Other Essays
(1929a). It was also during this time that Whitehead published several
of his less well-known books, including An Inquiry Concerning the
Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), The Concept of
Nature (1920) and The Principle of Relativity
(1922).

At its core, Whitehead's philosophy of education emphasizes the
idea that a good life is most profitably thought of as an educated or
civilized life, two terms which Whitehead often uses
interchangeably. As we think, we live. Thus it is only as we improve
our thoughts that we improve our lives. The result, says Whitehead, is
that “There is only one subject matter for education, and that
is Life in all its manifestations” (1929a, 10). This view in
turn has corollaries for both the content of education and its method
of delivery.

With regard to delivery, Whitehead emphasizes the importance of
remembering that a “pupil's mind is a growing organism ... it is
not a box to be ruthlessly packed with alien ideas” (1929a,
47). Instead, it is the purpose of education to stimulate and guide
each student's self-development. It is not the job of the educator
simply to insert into his students' minds little chunks of
knowledge.

With regard to content, Whitehead holds that any adequate education
must include a literary component, a scientific component and a
technical component. The first includes, not just the study of
language, but also the study of high achievement in human thought and
writing. The second includes practice in the observation of natural
phenomena as well as exposure to the testing of theories and of the
presumed law-like connections we find in the natural world. The third
focuses primarily on the “art of utilizing knowledge”
(1929a, 77), especially in the production of goods but also in any
area of so-called knowledge application. Although all three components
are essential for a proper education, varying degrees of emphasis will
be required, depending on a student's interests and abilities. (For
additional discussion, see Johnson 1946.)

The result, says Whitehead, is that the commonly made distinction
between technical education and liberal education “is
fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not
liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical: that is, no
education which does not impart both technique and intellectual
vision” (1929a, 74). The good life requires, not just
accomplishment, but also the stimulus to create, and participate in,
an improved, more civilized society.

Whitehead's contrast here is with Plato,
whose theory of education, Whitehead claims, focuses almost
exclusively on the theoretical and the veridical at the expense of the
practical, and which results only in commands, rather than in growing
capacities of self-awareness and self-guidance. (Other scholars have
sometimes chosen to differ.) In contrast, Whitehead sees education as
necessarily encouraging the marriage of thought with action. As he
puts it, “No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires
knowledge to appease his passion for discovery” (1929a, 74). As
a result, the “insistence in the Platonic culture on
disinterested intellectual appreciation is a psychological
error” (1929a, 73), an observation that Philip Jourdain
concludes is “of the first importance” (1918, 244) for any
successful theory of education.

Facing mandatory retirement in London, and upon being offered an
appointment at Harvard, Whitehead moved to the United States in
1924. Given his prior training in mathematics, it was sometimes joked
that the first philosophy lectures he ever attended were those he
himself delivered in his new role as Professor of
Philosophy. As Russell comments, “In England, Whitehead was
regarded only as a mathematician, and it was left to America to
discover him as a philosopher” (1952, 93).

A year after his arrival, he delivered Harvard's prestigious Lowell
Lectures. The lectures formed the basis for Science and the Modern
World (1925). The 1927/28 Gifford Lectures at the University of
Edinburgh followed shortly afterwards and resulted in the publication
of Whitehead's most comprehensive (but difficult to penetrate)
metaphysical work, Process and Reality (1929c). Together, his
three books The Concept of Nature (1920), Science and the
Modern World (1925) and Process and Reality (1929c)
provide a relatively complete statement of Whitehead's mature
metaphysical system.

Within this system, rather than assuming
substance as the basic metaphysical category,
Whitehead understands nature to be composed ultimately of
events. Events include among their ingredients what we normally think
of as objects. As Whitehead writes,

An object is an ingredient in the character of some event. In fact the
character of an event is nothing but the objects which are ingredient
in it and the ways in which those objects make their ingression into
the event. Thus the theory of objects is the theory of the comparison
of events. Events are only comparable because they body forth
permanences. We are comparing objects in events whenever we can say,
‘There it is again.’ Objects are the elements in nature
which can ‘be again.’ (1920, 143-4)

Later, Whitehead introduces a new metaphysically primitive notion
which he calls an actual occasion. For Whitehead, an actual
occasion (or actual entity) is not an enduring substance, but a
process of becoming. As Whitehead puts it, actual occasions are the
“final real things of which the world is made up”, they
are “drops of experience, complex and interdependent”
(1929c, Pt 1, Ch. 2, sec. 1, p. 27).

As Donald Sherburne explains, “It is customary to compare
an actual occasion with
a Leibnizian monad, with the caveat that whereas a monad is
windowless, an actual occasion is ‘all window.’ It is as
though one were to take Aristotle's system of
categories and ask what
would result if the category of substance were displaced from its
preeminence by the category of relation …” (Sherburne
1995, 852). As Whitehead himself tells us, his “philosophy of
organism is the inversion of Kant's philosophy … For Kant, the
world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the
subject emerges from the world” (quoted in Sherburne 1995,
852).

Significantly, many of these key aspects of Whitehead's metaphysics run
counter to the traditional view of material substance: “There
persists,” says Whitehead, a

fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of
an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a
flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless,
valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a
fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from
the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific
materialism.’ Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as
being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have
now arrived. (1925, 22)

The assumption of scientific materialism is effective in many
contexts, says Whitehead, only because it directs our attention to a
certain class of problems that lend themselves to analysis within this
framework. However, scientific materialism is less successful when
addressing issues of teleology (or purpose) and when trying to develop a
comprehensive, integrated picture of the universe as a whole.

According to Whitehead, recognition that the world is organic
rather than materialistic is essential for anyone wanting to
develop a comprehensive account of nature, and this change in
viewpoint can result as easily from attempts to understand human
psychology and teleology as from attempts to understand modern
physics. Says Whitehead, “Mathematical physics presumes in the
first place an electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and
time. The laws which condition this field are nothing else than the
conditions observed by the general activity of the flux of the world,
as it individualises itself in the events” (1925, 190). The
result is that nature is no longer thought to be simply atoms in the
void, but instead “a structure of evolving processes. The
reality is the process” (1925, 90).

Unlike the logical apparatus Whitehead developed with Russell,
Whitehead's attempt to provide a metaphysical unification of space,
time, matter, events and teleology has been less than enthusiastically
embraced by members of the broader philosophical community. In part,
this may be because of the connections Whitehead saw between his
metaphysics and traditional theism. According to Whitehead, religion
is concerned with permanence amid change, and can be found in the
ordering we find within nature, something he sometimes calls the
“primordial nature of God” (1929c, 31, 32; cf. Pt 5,
Ch. 2, secs 1-7).

As early as his writing of Religion in the Making (1926),
Whitehead had been interested in promoting the idea that religion
helps make sense of permanence amid change. Despite the fact that
the world is composed of events and processes (rather than of
unchanging objects), on Whitehead's view God still provides the world
with a kind of permanence. Thinkers who have been
influenced by this aspect of Whitehead's work include John B. Cobb Jr,
Charles Hartshorne, Norman Pittenger and
Marjorie Suchocki.

Whitehead's emphasis on change has also led some theologians to
conclude that, rather than being seen as the traditional unmoved
mover, God should be seen as being influenced as much by the world as
the world is influenced by God. As a result of books such as Cobb's
Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology (1971), some
contemporary theories of ecology have also been influenced by
Whitehead's ideas.

Thus, although not especially influential among many Anglo-American
secular philosophers, Whitehead's metaphysical ideas continue to have
influence among some theologians and philosophers of religion.

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